Helen Keller

[Harry Lime Juice]

I'm not making a positive claim, but this topic does pique my interest. I was wondering if there's any reason to believe that this pop hero actually did what she did, and wasn't some sort of tool exploited by those around her. I don't know the capabilities of those that are deaf and blind, but this smacks of the facilitated communication nonsense inre autism.

[Paulhoff]

I'm not making a positive claim, though this topic does pique my interest. I was wondering if there's any reason to believe that this pop hero actually did what she did, and wasn't some sort of tool exploited by those around her. I don't know the capabilities of those that are deaf and blind, but this smacks of the faciltated communication nonsense inre autism.
So you can't believe that there are people with more determination then you.

Paul

:) :) :)

[Harry Lime Juice]

Yeah, I know. I'm a dirty meanhead questioner...guy.

[JoeTheJuggler]

I used to work as an interpreter for the Deaf--though I never worked with the deaf blind.

I don't know exactly how much of the popular story of Helen Keller is biographical (that is, how much of The Miracle Worker was dramatized), but I have read some of Helen Keller's writing. I think her English was too facile for her to have been someone who had no residual hearing at all and no language whatsoever until she was over 5 years old (or whatever age she was). So I suspect either the story wasn't quite the way it was depicted in fiction or she had someone ghost writing for her when she was an adult. (I doubt the latter, so I more strongly suspect the former.)

[fuelair]

Have you seen any of the film of her ? That would really help answer your questions.

[Harry Lime Juice]

You'd figure that I'd have the frame of mind to hit up YouTube, but nay. I looked, and the footage was far more impressive than I was expecting.

[boloboffin]

Helen lost her hearing and sight due to childhood illness when she was 19 months old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller

She'd had normal language development up until that point, and before Anne Sullivan came to the Keller house, Helen had acquired around 60 signs to communicate in a rudimentary fashion with her family, most importantly with a daughter of the family cook.

So Helen's later renaissance under Sullivan's tutelage was fully grounded.

[Tricky]

Helen Keller was a very intelligent woman and once she overcame the barriers of her blindness and deafness, she lived a fairly normal, if public life.

It is pretty much accepted that she was homosexual, never marrying and living with her female "companion" for most of her life. She was not only an advocate for people with disabilities (naturally), whe was active in many political groups, especially those for the common man. She was a suffragette and a supporter of the Socialist Party and she helped found the ACLU.

Her life would have been pretty remarkable even without the handicaps she had to overcome, but now days, people know little else about her except what they saw in "The Miracle Worker".

[theprestige]

It is pretty much accepted that she was homosexual, never marrying and living with her female "companion" for most of her life.
Because Helen Keller really had no reason at all not to get married, and the only possible motive she could have had to live most of her life with a female companion would have been homosexual urges, am I right?

I mean, it's not like there's anything else in her background that might suggest other reasons for this kind of behavior, is there?

[Cactus Wren]

I'm not making a positive claim, but this topic does pique my interest. I was wondering if there's any reason to believe that this pop hero actually did what she did, and wasn't some sort of tool exploited by those around her. I don't know the capabilities of those that are deaf and blind, but this smacks of the facilitated communication nonsense inre autism.

Helen Keller wrote -- she typed -- her books and articles herself. She communicated by finger-spelling with anyone who could understand the manual alphabet. She made lengthy speeches at her public appearances and engaged in question-and-answer sessions, with the questions translated into the manual alphabet, but speaking her answers aloud. This hardly smacks of "facilitated communication". The only element of her education that even slightly hints at such a thing is the "Frost King" incident from her childhood, which authorities agree was probably due to cryptamnesia.

I used to work as an interpreter for the Deaf--though I never worked with the deaf blind.

I don't know exactly how much of the popular story of Helen Keller is biographical (that is, how much of The Miracle Worker was dramatized), but I have read some of Helen Keller's writing. I think her English was too facile for her to have been someone who had no residual hearing at all and no language whatsoever until she was over 5 years old (or whatever age she was). So I suspect either the story wasn't quite the way it was depicted in fiction or she had someone ghost writing for her when she was an adult. (I doubt the latter, so I more strongly suspect the former.)
"Facile"? If you mean that Keller's writing style was florid and slightly stilted, I agree: but bear in mind that most of her experience was with written language of the nineteenth century. Everyone wrote that way.

That Keller's English was even as colloquial as it was is directly creditable to Anne Sullivan, and specifically to her resolution that young Helen should learn language in the way a child does: by immersion, by being surrounded with it, and -- at least in the beginning -- without formal lessons. Compare this with the experience of deaf-blind Laura Bridgman, whose formalized, step-by-step teachings in English led to her asking such questions as "Is it derivative outside?" (after being informed that "rain" was a primary word and "rainy" a derivative word), and to her writing to an acquaintance when she was fifty:
My dear Friend,
I am staying up to my sunny & cosy room this A M. It is not as frosty to day, as it has been for a few days. I wish you a merry Christmas & a jolly & happy new year. I respond many thanks to you for the box full of bounties that I rec'd with so much pleasure & joy this week, ere Christmas. There was not of any injury about the nice box, & is all safe. I wished to write you before, but my time was so crowded with business, & etc. I should be happy to send you a gift, for a new year. Do not think of a thing as a token. I was ill a few days, & feel so languid most of time I will write you again some time. God bless you during a happy new year. I'm so busy now.

Your loving friend

L D Bridgman.
... whereas Keller wrote:
The Brooklyn Eagle says, apropos of me, and socialism, that Helen Keller's "mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development." Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr. McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. It was after a meeting that we had in New York in behalf of the blind. At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him.[ ... ]
The simple fact is that Helen Keller was blind, deaf, and a genius. She was almost certainly more intelligent brighter than either you or I. And forty years after her death, people are still willing to mutter irritably about the "manifest limitations of her development".

[boloboffin]

Mark Twain writing to Helen (http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?SectionID=1&TopicID=193&SubTopicID=22) on the Frost King incident:

To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn't sleep for blaspheming about it last night.

Oh, I've been there. And I am so stealing that line.

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

Because Helen Keller really had no reason at all not to get married, and the only possible motive she could have had to live most of her life with a female companion would have been homosexual urges, am I right?

I mean, it's not like there's anything else in her background that might suggest other reasons for this kind of behavior, is there?

Seconded. In that time, it was common for women (especially elderly old maids) to have female companions at home. Poor relations, boarders, charity cases or friends-who-were-practically-servants.

It's not a strange arrangement for a blind and deaf woman. No man would ever marry her because of two disabilities and she most likely needed constant help.

Of course, she might have been gay. Or maybe not.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

From what I understand, she sure played a mean pinball.

[Ian Osborne]

From what I understand, she sure played a mean pinball.

You sod! You made me laugh when I shouldn't... :D

[LibraryLady]

Helen Keller was a very intelligent woman and once she overcame the barriers of her blindness and deafness, she lived a fairly normal, if public life.

It is pretty much accepted that she was homosexual, never marrying and living with her female "companion" for most of her life. She was not only an advocate for people with disabilities (naturally), whe was active in many political groups, especially those for the common man. She was a suffragette and a supporter of the Socialist Party and she helped found the ACLU.

Her life would have been pretty remarkable even without the handicaps she had to overcome, but now days, people know little else about her except what they saw in "The Miracle Worker".


I'm supposed to be lurking right now, as I'm in a hospital waiting room with my sister, but I'll just butt in here and say that in later biographies of Keller, it has been revealed that she did fall in love and become engaged to a man, but the relationship did not work out. Annie Sullivan married when Helen was in her twenties, and she lived with the couple, not "alone with a companion." In the two or three biographies of her I have read, I've not seen anything about homosexuality.

[back to lurking]

[JoeTheJuggler]

Helen lost her hearing and sight due to childhood illness when she was 19 months old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller

She'd had normal language development up until that point, and before Anne Sullivan came to the Keller house, Helen had acquired around 60 signs to communicate in a rudimentary fashion with her family, most importantly with a daughter of the family cook.

So Helen's later renaissance under Sullivan's tutelage was fully grounded.
Thanks.

That makes a lot of sense.

Helen Keller was a very intelligent woman and once she overcame the barriers of her blindness and deafness, she lived a fairly normal, if public life.
My point was that intelligence does not equate with the ability to learn English without seeing or hearing. That she already had language development (and hearing and sight) in her infancy explains how she was able to become so skilled in English.


"Facile"? If you mean that Keller's writing style was florid and slightly stilted, I agree: but bear in mind that most of her experience was with written language of the nineteenth century. Everyone wrote that way.
No. (And that's not what "facile" means. See meaning two here (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/facile).) I meant that her English skills were beyond what someone who was profoundly deaf from birth and who had no prior language development would be able to acquire later. Her writing doesn't resemble that of someone deaf from birth. (Which makes sense, because she wasn't.)

One of my last clients (as an interpreter for the deaf) was someone who lost her hearing from German Measles at around age 5. Since she already had language (and sound was something she knew about and understood), her speech reading was very good, and her English was above average. On the other hand, I've had clients that were truly profoundly deaf from birth.

Some of them were very intelligent people, but to them sound was something they really didn't "get" and their English was poor at best.

[bruto]

I'm not making a positive claim, but this topic does pique my interest. I was wondering if there's any reason to believe that this pop hero actually did what she did, and wasn't some sort of tool exploited by those around her. I don't know the capabilities of those that are deaf and blind, but this smacks of the facilitated communication nonsense inre autism."Facilitated communication" involves a person speaking for another who cannot communicate normally. Helen Keller spoke, and also read and wrote in Braille. Although she may well have needed help to live comfortably, she did not need interecession to communicate. Big difference.

[kittynh]

I have taught at a school that is on the campus of a state school for the deaf. Trust me, Helen wasn't "faking". She was very intelligent, but the neglect seen in the movie was not her life before Annie Sullivan came.

Deaf and blind people are quite productive. I know a deaf and blind person that owns his own restaurant and develops all the recipes. He also helps cook! He doesn't wait tables though unless "we are really crowded!" He had no language until age 6. But he had a lot of love and interaction from his parents. THey just didn't know how very much he could achieve in life, until he went to the school for the deaf.

[JoeTheJuggler]

I have taught at a school that is on the campus of a state school for the deaf. Trust me, Helen wasn't "faking". She was very intelligent, but the neglect seen in the movie was not her life before Annie Sullivan came.
Again, facility with the English language doesn't necessarily equate with intelligence. Now that I know the Miracle Worker version of her life isn't true, I have no doubt that Helen Keller wrote without a ghost writer or any such a thing.

If she was profoundly deaf from birth and had no exposure to language before Anne Sullivan, then it wouldn't matter much how intelligent she was. She wouldn't be able to write as well as she did, and I would suspect a ghost writer or something (what I think the OP meant rather than "facilitated communication").

I know plenty of very intelligent deaf people who have very poor (or even non-existent) English skills.

[JoeTheJuggler]

"Facilitated communication" involves a person speaking for another who cannot communicate normally. Helen Keller spoke, and also read and wrote in Braille. Although she may well have needed help to live comfortably, she did not need interecession to communicate. Big difference.

And for the record, even if she needed an interpreter to communicate with "sign-language-impaired people" in real time, this too is not F.C. F.C. was a misguided (or fraudulent) attempt to communicate with people who couldn't communicate due to autism or something like that. Skeptic's Dictonary has a good essay on the subject (http://www.skepdic.com/facilcom.html). (I don't think it's waht the OP meant.)

[Baby Nemesis]

I have taught at a school that is on the campus of a state school for the deaf. Trust me, Helen wasn't "faking". She was very intelligent, but the neglect seen in the movie was not her life before Annie Sullivan came.

Deaf and blind people are quite productive. I know a deaf and blind person that owns his own restaurant and develops all the recipes. He also helps cook! He doesn't wait tables though unless "we are really crowded!" He had no language until age 6. But he had a lot of love and interaction from his parents. THey just didn't know how very much he could achieve in life, until he went to the school for the deaf.

Sorry if this is going slightly off-topic, but I suspect you're talking about a partially deaf and partially blind person here. A totally deaf and blind person would presumably have serious ethical concerns about waiting on tables at any time - "If I misjudge by only a few inches, I could bruise someone by bashing a plate into them, or scald them by knocking what I'm carrying into something and spilling something hot down them - and what if I crash into someone while I'm carrying hot plates who's standing in between the kitchen and the restaurant who didn't see me coming?" You'd surely need a little bit of an indicator to alert you to such things.

[fuelair]

Again, facility with the English language doesn't necessarily equate with intelligence. Now that I know the Miracle Worker version of her life isn't true, I have no doubt that Helen Keller wrote without a ghost writer or any such a thing.

If she was profoundly deaf from birth and had no exposure to language before Anne Sullivan, then it wouldn't matter much how intelligent she was. She wouldn't be able to write as well as she did, and I would suspect a ghost writer or something (what I think the OP meant rather than "facilitated communication").

I know plenty of very intelligent deaf people who have very poor (or even non-existent) English skills.

I thought what was meant by facile was quite clear!!:)